Can a Smaller Blog Ever Earn Advertising Revenue?

According to an exhaustive and comprehensive done by E-marketer.com, experts are projecting that over $31 billion dollars has been spent on online ad space; the bulk of which going toward search and display based formats.

Traditionally, much of this money went towards the top-grossing, Internet-based companies, like Yahoo!, AOL and Google, but with a new-found push towards niche-like websites throughout the web, more emphasis is projected to be placed on smaller websites in the entertainment, health and home economics genres.

Big Fish, Even Bigger Pond

Granted, the majority of money will continue to go towards those top-grossing companies we mentioned earlier, but this also means that more attention will be placed on smaller websites that are leading examples within their particular genre.

For example, mom bloggers with a niche focus and their larger blogging networks and affiliates could find themselves hot commodities, ad wise, within the next two to three years.

Richer Media

More importantly, in a genre that relies heavily on rich media (e.g. audio, video and photo) to convey information to its audiences, finding companies wanting to invest in, say, a great slideshow recipe series or imaginative home improvement podcast will become that much easier to find. But don’t become discouraged if it’s a situation where your blog strong suit isn’t rich media driven; text-based banner ads are still just as important to advertisers now as they were five or ten years ago. The times, as they say, are a-changin’.

Advertising Tides Have Changed

The study also found that many local advertisers are shifting their resources to online to serve as a customer base for small and medium-sized businesses. This means that a person running a blog out of San Francisco will be more likely to attract local advertisers based not just on page views or Google Rank but also by location of their operations.

It’s been long understood that advertisers were going to make the shift from pouring ad dollars into traditional forms of media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, etc.) to investing time, research and money into more cavalier, so to speak, forms of media (e.g. blogs, websites, vodcasts).

Now, although it may never be a situation where the “next big niche blog” will start pulling in the kind of ad revenue as a Google.com or Yahoo! (but wouldn’t it be nice?), companies that are willing to dole out dollars to a successful niche blog or network will start lining up with a little more gusto than they have been in the past. That, Ladies, is the future. Blogging as a platform for your career, or as a business in itself, depends on a long view of the future. The future is bright and all you need to do is keep dreaming, hustling and building.

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